New Sentences: From ‘Winners Take All,’ by Anand Giridharadas

‘Accountancy, medicine, education, espionage, and seafaring all have their own tools and modes of analysis, but none of those approaches was widely promoted as the solution to virtually everything else.’

— From “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” (Knopf, 2018, Page 31), by Anand Giridharadas.

Anand Giridharadas points to one of America’s central mythologies: We are often encouraged to see business as a kind of master key to the universe. Its tools and skills, we are led to believe, are magically transferable to every other arena of life. We allow business leaders to make or influence our most crucial public decisions: transit, taxation, education, immigration, health care, public safety, city planning and on and on. And we are expected to listen, with a straight face, when candidates proclaim that government itself should be run like a business.

It is true that deep knowledge of the business world is nuanced and challenging and fascinating. But only within its sphere. Business is as specialized as any other discipline: Its logic and tools are specific to its own needs, just like the logic and tools of library science, pottery, molecular biology, surfing and forestry. Success in one field does not equate to success in any other. Our elevation of business over all other disciplines is pure American hoodoo — a bubbling witches’ brew of bootstraps and sparrows and rags and riches and invisible-finger bones.

To say that a successful businessman is inherently capable of running a government is like saying that a squid — based on its admirable mastery of the world’s oceans — would be an excellent judge in the Westminster Dog Show. We tell ourselves that the outsider’s perspective will be tonic — but then our fascinating new judge waves its tentacle at a prizewinning terrier, opens its little sea-beak and croaks its verdict: “This contestant has only half the normal number of legs, lives in the wrong element and lacks a mechanism for squirting ink when threatened. It is disqualified.”

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine.

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A version of this article appears in print on , Page 13 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: From ‘Winners Take All,’ by Anand Giridharadas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe